References Should Not Be a Part of the
		     Candidate Evaluation Process
			   Terrence Brannon


WHY REFERENCES ARE PROBLEMATIC IN GENERAL

1/ The reference and/or his company can get in legal trouble. Oracle,
for example, has a policy that its employees will not give references
to former employees. The extent of referent information is employment
verification via Human Resources: they will disclose manager
name, salary, and duration and location of employment. I worked at
Oracle. I can't get a character or technical reference from them. I
love the skeptical looks I get when I try to explain this to people.

Perhaps the fact that the 2nd largest software company in this nation
does not do references should give you an idea that references may not
be such a good idea after all.

2/ Most of the people I have worked for see time as money and do not
want to spend time on something that does not yield money, e.g.,
talking on the phone with someone to give a reference. A typical job
search might involve applying to four to eight places. 15
minutes per reference phone call means 1-2 hours out of each references
work week during a typical job search. Your reference (and his boss)
will love you for taking up his time.

As a contractor, I might change jobs every six months. Do you think my
potential references savor answering the same questions every six
months for no financial kickback? I don't think so.

3/ References allow a bad boss one more cheap shot at you. If you
worked for a jerk, then what? As an extreme example, assume that
Martin Luther King worked for 3 closet white supremacists. Would he
ever get a good reference? Probably not. But that doesn't mean that he
is a bad person.

4/ People move, retire, die, or go out of business: I worked during
the dot-com era. That's 3 years worth of references that I will never
be able to resource because all of those people have bitten the
dust. I guess that makes me a bad person.

WHY TECHNICAL REFERENCES ARE POINTLESS

1/ If you want to know how good I am technically, break out the
appropriate technical test.

WHY CHARACTER REFERENCES PROVE NOTHING

1/ Let's assume that a character reference is a good way of knowing
how good person A is. Let's call person A's reference person B. Unless
you know B personally you really don't know whether to believe what he
is saying about A. You therefore need person B's references. Call them
person(s) C. Again, unless you know person C personally, you need
references for person C. Call them person D. You see how endless this
process is.

2/ Some people like to say that they like to talk to a reference and
read between the lines of what the reference is saying. What happens
if my former boss is not a native English speaker? They won't be able
to glean all the subtle cues from his speech that they would from a
native English speaker. Am I to suffer because someone else had a boss
that could provide you with more touchy-feely information?

MY POLICY

You may contact my former employers after I have a contract for the
sole purpose of verifying objective information such as salary and
dates of employment. You may not contact my former employers to get an
idea of how good an employee I was.

A BITTER EXPERIENCE

I will never forget when I was contacted for a position at Health
Market Science in Conshohocken, PA. They liked my resume but insisted
on speaking to 3 references before bringing me in for a personal
interview. At first I said no, but then gave in because this was
January 2002 and jobs were scarce. So they called up my references and
my references gave me a glowing review. So they bring me in for a job
interview and I blow away their technical tests. However, even though
the job req had no Java on it, they mention that they will be
reimplementing some Perl stuff in Java at which point I say I will not
do Java.

So they pass on me. My references' time was wasted all because they
did not evaluate me first.

I cannot allow this to happen again.